Pretesting is back in fashion

Pretesting has long been standard for big campaigns. With hundreds of assets per campaign and platforms that optimize delivery on their own, some teams started to skip it and launch everything at once. Duncan sees that changing. "Even with huge volumes of digital assets, you can now screen everything quickly," he says. "Screen out the worst performers and put more money behind the best."

Engagement is the wrong thing to optimize for

Likes, shares and view rates are easy to read, but they rarely tell you whether an ad builds the brand or sells. "Platform metrics are understandable, but they're dangerous," Duncan explains. Gut feel has its own problems. So he recommends testing with real people for hero assets, and predictive screening for everything else.

Testing every asset, not just the hero ads

Campaigns now multiply across platforms, markets and formats, and the long tail of TikToks, Instagram posts and Snaps often goes out unchecked. Duncan describes a simple triage: green assets go through, amber ones get fine-tuned, and the weakest are screened out before they reach the media plan. People still make the close calls. An ad that scores 69 against an action standard of 70 needs a second look, not an automatic rejection.

Why Kantar chose Neurons heatmaps

Kantar and Neurons share a starting point: work back from what has worked. Neurons heatmaps are trained on a large dataset of real human eye-tracking. When Kantar compared the attention heatmaps on the market, Neurons came out closest to what it sees in real eye-tracking studies, and passed a review by Kantar's neuroscience team. The heatmaps now sit alongside Kantar's own measures.

More assets, same quality bar

"We see clear benefits for clients who test effectiveness at scale," Duncan notes. "The ones doing it best aren't just getting huge numbers of assets into the market. They're also keeping their quality standards."

Conclusion: pretest every ad before launch

Screen out weak assets, improve the near misses and back your strongest work before you spend.

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5 creative myths put to the test - watch the full webinar.